Set in different cities around the world – New York, London, Singapore – this wry and playful debut collection of award-winning short stories are about emigration, identity, diasporas, family ties.
Elaine Chiew’s stories are inter-laced with humour, compassion and the importance of food and cooking, and the memories that meals evoke, as her characters negotiate unfamiliar worlds, raise children in another country or introduce parents to partners who don’t speak their language.
In the title story, four writers find their cultural bonds of friendship tested when a handsome young Asian man joins their group. In other stories, a brother searches for his sister forced to serve as a comfort woman during World War Two; three Singaporean sisters run a French gourmet restaurant in New York; a woman raps about being a Tiger Mother in Belgravia; and a filmmaker struggles to document the lives of samsui women—Singapore’s thrifty, hardworking construction workers.
Elaine Chiew drills below the surface of her characters’ circumstances with exemplary narrative skill and subtlety. Her stories are as varied, worldly and emotionally resonant as the characters themselves. This is fabulous debut collection and heralds an exciting new literary talent .
The Heartsick Diaspora by Elaine Chiew
Elaine Chiew is a writer and visual arts researcher. Her short story collection The Heartsick Diaspora (Penguin SEA 2019 & Myriad Editions UK 2020) explores the Malaysian and Singaporean Chinese diaspora living primarily in London, New York, and Singapore; it has been mentioned as a recommended read in The Guardian, The Straits Times Singapore, BookRiot and Esquire SG, been featured in literary festivals in Singapore, Malaysia and Kerala, received a Special Mention in the UK Saboteur Awards and reviewed favourably in Malaysia, Singapore, UK and US. She is also the compiler/editor of Cooked Up: Food Fiction From Around the World (New Internationalist, 2015). Twice winner of the Bridport Short Story Competition in the UK, she has had numerous stories published in Singapore, US and UK anthologies, most recently with BBC Radio Four and in A View of Stars (Marshall Cavendish, 2020), and shortlisted most recently for The Manchester Short Story Prize. Her articles on arts and culture have appeared in ArtReview Asia, Ocula and ArtsEquator, and she has made guest appearances on BBC Radio London, Open Book for BBC Radio 4 as well as BBC Cultural Frontline.
Originally from Ipoh, Malaysia, she has a J.D. from Stanford Law School and has had a prior career as a corporate securities lawyer working in New York, Hong Kong and London with New York law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell before going in-house with Goldman Sachs. In 2017, she received an MA in Asian Art History at LASALLE College of the Arts Singapore (a degree conferred by Goldsmiths, University of London) and has worked as a Research Officer for the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore as well as Asia Curator for The Creative Process, an interdisciplinary initiative hosting travelling exhibitions to leading universities around the world. In 2017, she was selected as Writer-in-Residence at SOTA Singapore. In 2021, she has received a grant from the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre in collaboration with LASALLE School of the Arts to conduct art historical research into Chinese photography at the turn of the 20th century.